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airpodsman

Re:Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly? on Monday September 02, 2024 @03:56PM (#41428304)
Let me know if you end up researching this further and what the conclusion is. I think the best way to tackle this would be via an API the customers can give you.

The idea is a simple marketing tool to help businesses reach out to customers that didn’t convert fully through the funnel. So for example, user created a profile, but didn’t end up purchasing.

If interested, I can share the link (once it’s up) and would love to get your feedback.

Re:Scratched my own itch and built something on Monday September 02, 2024 @09:13AM (#41425135)
Nothing super crazy -- a very simple tool to find Global Entry Appointments.

A couple months ago, I was struggling to find Global Entry Appointments in my area. Being a developer I naturally opened up the Network Tab to see how the Scheduler on the website retrieved availabilities and to my surprise it was an open endpoint. I built a script around it to notify me of availabilities as they opened up. I was like yo why not just build this as a service and see if people find it useful

Upon doing research I was quick to learn what I was doing nothing new but had been done others as well -- but my main goal wasn't to make money. It was to scratch my itch and just build a product around it. Even if I could make a few bucks, I would have been proud of myself and that what I wanted to validate.

I spent hours dissecting the API, built my own API Docs around the endpoints, hosted it on Notion so I can refer to them and eventually launched Snapslot. Through this process, I got very familiar with: - Next.js App Router - MongoDB / Mongoose - Tailwind CSS and DaisyUI

I've gotten a few online customers from complete random strangers which is a rewarding feeling and now I think I've caught the indiehacking / project bug. Thinking of writing a full featured blog in the future on my experience to cover all technical and marketing efforts.

My Lessons Learned: - Just ship it. Who cares what happens. Through this I learned that the lessons you learn will just compound on your experience and you'll be able to ship faster. You'll also run into other problems and if the initial idea doesn't work out, you can go back to your those problems you solved and maybe productize that.

Re:Does anyone integrate with their customers' DB directly? on Monday September 02, 2024 @08:45AM (#41424948)
I was thinking the same thing. I have an idea that I've been thinking about for some time but requires data to the Customer's Data. They'd have to expose us to ingest that either through : 1) an API that the customer exposes to you 2) Connected to the data source directly in a secure manner.

Option 1 seems like a lot of work for the customer ... probably not viable.

Option 2: you can securely connect to their data-source using oAuth2.0. In fact I know MongoDB offers this (https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/security-oidc/) for this exact use-case I believe. I recall using Vercel to integrate with my MongoDB.

MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/security-oidc/ Supabase: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth

Though I haven't done it directly, I think integrating with the DB through a secure protocol like oAuth is the way to go. DB services offer this and must be for this exact use case.